This book started it all for me. It stood out in the sociology section of floor 3 at the library. They say that you can't judge a book by its cover, but often, a cover will tell you a lot about the book.

That's how it was with this one. The cover was funky, with half-finished etchings. What was written inside was even better. It was a beautiful discourse on the nature of Love. From Agathon's (it was Agathon that told of Achilles and Patroclus...wasn't it?) tale of devotion, Aristophanes' haunting fable about our "other halves" (and the interludes in between, especially the one about hiccoughs) to Socrates' speech on love "involving the mind and not the body", this is a timeless and highly accessable study.

Read it a few years ago, and have been into philosophy ever since.

Not only should this book be the literary book-fellow to any Classics student, but an absolute must for every human being on the face of the planet. Griffins' translation is not only beautifully rendered/translated but extremely funky and contemporary. It is so applicable to our own modern interpertations of life, the universe,and everything, that you will easily forget than it was written over 2,500 years ago. In addition, the book design values are astounding. The fonts, both English and Greek, are lovely that even the reader who has never studied Greek will fall in love with the flowing lines.

EM Forster wrote this book in 1913-14 but declined to allow it to be published till after his death. It tells of Maurice Hall (which immediately made me think of Radclyffe Hall's classic 'The Well of Loneliness) growing up with an awareness and horror of his homosexuality. As I struggled to develop a 'oneness' with characters who were so alien to my own natural preference an amazing thing happened in the story. One of the two main 'gay' (Forster does not use this word) characters suddenly decides he likes women. Does this happen, I wondered? Or was it an excuse used by one 'gay' (or bisexual) person to disengage from a partner they no longer enjoyed? For me, of course, it drove another knife between the remaining 'gay' character and myself. It seemed that homosexuals could be changed/change - they could all be like me! Was this a literary device of Forster that aims to modify the responses of readers - making the job harder for heterosexual readers to identify with Maurice, making homosexual readers even more keenly feel the alienation of society (especially when the book was written)?

In an afterword Forster explains that his book had to have a happy ending (despite great trauma suicide is mentioned only once throughout the book). This made me think again of Radclyffe Hall's 'Well of Loneliness' with its remorseless and, for me, unsatisfyingly negative ending. Hall wrote her novel about lesbians in 1928 and it created a furore in its time. That Forster was sitting on his novel at the time is an intersting thing to me. Was he tempted to publish? Perhaps he felt he could not join the same storm. Perhaps he originally had the miserable ending Hall wrote, and changed to distinguish his novel. In the end, these can be little more than speculations.

When I read Richard Fortey's book 'Trilobite' I complained in my review that I never really got to like trilobites as Mr Fortey obviosly does, despite enjoying the book immensely. The case is the same here. Forster's writing is inventive and rich, but I am left feeling just as alienated from homosexuals - I am simply not one of them. Am I more sympathetic? Perhaps. But the best that I can hope for is probably to be more tolerant.

The film of "Maurice" produced by Merchant Ivory a number of years ago is one my favorite films. I was curious, having never read E.M. Forster before, to see how much of the issue of homosexuality was a product of the book and how much was played-up for the film. The book did not dissapoint. An honest, self-aware writer, E.M. Forster tells a beautiful story of a fairly unremarkable young man who is forced to (by virtue of being gay) become remarkable. Problems of English repugnance at homosexuality (a feeling he shares himself at first) and of class make him into a grownup, into a real man. In the book this becomes a wonderful liberation--that does not come through as well in the film. A marvelous read. Not published until after his death in 1970. Only a few read it when he actually wrote it in the teens. Too dangerous. A shame. Far ahead of it's time.

I think I'm setting myself up to be abused for an imperfect understanding of Forster's work, but I love Maurice, and I only like everything else he wrote. Forster's plots to me are so controlled that his novels become more like chess games than stories--his characters move entirely according to their classist/symbolic value; their minds are types, their types interact. Sometimes this interaction is delightful, as in Room with a View. Sometimes it is genuinely touching, as in Where Angels Fear to Tread. But it is always highly regimented. This criticism extends for me to his prose, which I find to be too rule-bound--he always leaves the same words out; his style is symbolic of delicate subtlety without necessarily being so.

But in Maurice, Forster lets go some of this reserve. His prose, which I find formulaic in his later stuff, is here undeveloped enough to be idiosyncratic, un-stylized, and gorgeous. Maurice as a character is wonderfully, wonderfully real, and I appreciate the detailed development of the plot because Forster brings home with such ability the hazards of Maurice's struggle, the ever-present possibility of failure, the balance between lesser and more important goals, and the way in which Forster makes clear that these goals, as Maurice knows when he "listens beneath" words, are not the ends that he is really achieving as he achieves them. Maurice himself is drawn with Jane Austen-ian precision: Forster mixes the divine heroism--beauty and brutality--in Maurice's essential, private life with his utterly mundane non-essentials--politics, understanding, relationships with family, opinions, way of talking, appearance, job.

This is a heroic book. It moves me to tears every time I read it.

A Passage to India is Forster's most celebrated and most frequently read novel. Published in 1924, the novel has given rise to critical discussion about imperialism, liberalism, modernism, ethnicity, sexuality and the relation of the personal and political. With Forster being one of the chief authors of early twentieth-century English literature, this text is a key text to the modern novel. Therefore, Routledge has decided to publish a sourcebook on the novel in their series of literary sourcebooks, edited by Duncan Wu (Oxford). Peter Childs, the editor of the book, is Principal Lecturer in English at the University of Gloucestershire and well known due to his publications on twentieth-century prose.

The approach of this book is very different to other critical works. It has been designed to provide students with the materials required to begin serious studies of their own. This is reflected in the structure of the book. Section 1, 'Contexts,' provides biographical data in form of an author chronology and contemporary documents relating to the author and his work-every single one of them by Forster himself. The texts are structured in four major groups: 'The English and the British Empire', 'On A Passage to India', 'India' and 'On the Rhythm in Fiction.' Section 2, 'Interpretations,' contains what the most critical books contain: critical approaches to the text. In Childs's book, they are sorted as a history of criticism. This part is divided into three main chapters. The first gives an overview over the critical reception of Forster's novel whereas the second as well as the third are selections of extracts from the most important and influential early and modern criticism. The last part of the second section is dedicated to the stage and film adaptations, but does-alas!-not tell about all and the most recent adaptations. Section 3 is called 'Key Passages.' This is clearly a euphemism for a chapter summary with snippets of the original text. The reason to have these forty-eight pages in the book is simple: They are for the lazy students. They summarize the plot, they give examples for brief presentations; they tell the reader the setting, the point of view-everything which would take the student five minutes having the novel in hand. Furthermore, they tell the reader how to interpret the text. The rest of the book is a short list of recommended editions and further texts, followed by an index.

One can ask for the perfect reader of this book, and one will find none. For the student who really wants to do research on Forster, the references are too few and the critical extracts to short and to various. There is a general lack of in-depth analysis. The editor, so it seems, did neither want to focus on a specific aspect of the novel nor put an emphasis on a specific type of criticism, whether feminist, postcolonial, biographical or structuralist criticism. The idea to provide a book of sources as a basis for discussion is laudable, but it is disavowed by the I-tell-you-how-to-read-this-novel part of the sourcebook. What this sourcebook can do is to give you a general overview over the history and the types of criticism, a timeline of Forster's life and a selection of letters and essays, which can form a contextual frame for the novel. One can recommend Peter Childs's book to teachers who either really want to discuss the novel or have no idea and want to deliver the usual interpretational phrases, and the book is recommendable to people who do not want to read the novel by themselves and have no internet account to find the freely available chapter summaries. Still, the book is well done, very clearly arranged and of a certain academic standard. As first overview for a subsequent authentic research, this well-written book is good choice.